Re: [PATCH -mm] memcg: prevent from OOM with too many dirty pages

From: Fengguang Wu
Date: Wed Jun 20 2012 - 05:55:54 EST


> > Finally, I wonder if there should be some timeout of that wait. I
> > don't know why, but I wouldn't be surprised if we hit some glitch which
> > causes us to add one!
> >
>
> If we hit such a situation it means that flush is no longer working which
> is interesting in itself. I guess one possibility where it can occur is
> if we hit global dirty limits (or memcg dirty limits when they exist)
> and the page is backed by NFS that is disconnected. That would stall here
> potentially forever but it's already the case that a system that hits its
> dirty limits with a disconnected NFS is in trouble and a timeout here will
> not do much to help.

Agreed. I've run into such cases and cannot login even locally because
the shell will be blocked trying to write even 1 byte at startup time.
Any opened shells are also stalled on writing to .bash_history etc.

Thanks,
Fengguang
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